In the Heart of the Sea

Nathaniel Philbrick

First they saw bones--human bones--littering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat were the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered with sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates.

Of the twenty men who escaped the whale-crushed ship, only eight survived. The two men rescued by the Dauphin had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific--farther by at least 500 miles than Captain William Bligh's epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackleton's equally famous passage to South Georgia Island.

One of the great shipwreck stories of seafaring lore; the shipwreck of the Essex was the inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick. We humans rarely recognize the amount of luck that allows us to continue in the belief that we dominate nature. When nature gets angry, technology suddenly reveals how rotten and weak its fibers are.